A family of Escape Room Afficionados!

The description for Key Hunter “The Double Crossing” has quite an exciting story line, which is one of the main reasons we decided to take on this challenge. It sounded different from any other we had done. The story goes: “Irwin Gibson, an American spy, was sent to the Russia-China border in order to obtain evidence of large-scale nuclear weapon production. He locates them, but was soon captured by the authorities and locked up in a cell. The American government denies all involvement with his activities, and he soon finds himself walking a lonely path, demotivated by betrayal. The only thing he can do now is escape…”

After doing a few games at various places around Birmingham we decided to try different story lines to see what we enjoyed most. We had high expectations for this game, the website was well presented, modern and up to date and they have 4.7/5.0 reviews on Facebook!!

On entering the room we were greeted by what seemed to be a recently vacated bedroom. It smelt damp and dirty, the furniture looked as if it had been sifted out of a skip. It was sparse, very empty of props. It didn’t give a feeling of “oh this looks exciting” but instead, a bad feeling of disappointment. At one point we all looked at each other and thought… what have we done?

The puzzles were very badly worn and disorganized. Some were pieces of cardboard that had been cut from a box, most likely out of the same skip as the furniture. They over-complicated things unnecessarily with languages – there was Russian, English, Morse Code, Chinese and Braille. That sounds like it could be fun deciphering various codes, but no, the way you had to solve the codes were so vague it became frustrating and unenjoyable.The puzzles tried to flow, but we were left with gaps and moments where we had no idea what was going on.

The clues were passed to us via what seemed to be a child’s walkie talkie, it was pink with princess stickers on. The frequency often crossed channels with other signals in the area, mainly taxi drivers. When asked for a clue, the game master had no idea what stage we were in the game and had to talk through the puzzles until we got to where we needed to go next. Very unprofessional and very unenjoyable.

The building’s main reception was nothing fancy, it looked as if it had been recently painted. Toilets were unclean. I would highly advise you not to visit this location. We have completed two games at this venue (booked for the same day sadly) and albeit when completed we were inexperienced, we still felt unsatisfied with our experience.